In 1999, Stephen King found himself confined to a hospital room “after a careless driver in a minivan smashed the shit out of me on a country road.” There, “roaring with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers,” and surely more than a little bored, he popped a movie into the … | Continue reading
What’s the difference between the United States of America and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a culture. So goes one of many jokes long in circulation about the supposed American tendency toward low-minded, expedient philistinism. … | Continue reading
Late this summer, the Talking Heads released a remastered version of their concert film, Stop Making Sense. Although the film has already left some theaters, the band hasn’t stopped promoting it. Above, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth join Stephen Colb … | Continue reading
The building that houses Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre began life as Dan Lowrey’s Star of Erin Music Hall. It has undergone several name changes over the course of its 145 years, and played host to drama, opera, ballet, films, oratorio, pantomime, variety shows, and world-famous popu … | Continue reading
When François Rabelais came up with a couple of giants to put at the center of a series of inventive and ribald works of satirical fiction, he named one of them Gargantua. That may not sound particularly clever today, gargantuan being a fairly common adjective to describe anythin … | Continue reading
We’ve got a thing for creative problem solvers here at Open Culture. We also love a good community-spirited project. Graphic designer Valery Marier ticks both boxes with archives.design, a free graphic design archive that was born of her frustrations with online research at a tim … | Continue reading
About a decade and a half ago, The Lost City of Z seemed to have been placed front-and-center in most bookstores of the English-speaking world. It was the first book by journalist David Grann, and it handily proved that he knew how to deal with history in a way that could capture … | Continue reading
?si=cPPdX0lEFTgicTQV No instrument is more closely identified with rock and roll music than the electric guitar, and no form of performance is more closely associated with the electric guitar than the solo. You can hardly discuss any of those three without discussing the others. … | Continue reading
A staple of Andean diets for thousands of years, quinoa (KEEN-wah) has been touted as a superfood recently for its high protein content and potential to solve hunger crises. It’s represented by the usual celebrities: Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston … and David Lynch. … | Continue reading
In 1939, Margaret Hamilton made cinema history as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. In 1976, she made television history by reprising the role on a Sesame Street episode that was pulled from the show’s rotation immediately after it aired. It seems to have drawn S … | Continue reading
Halloween looms. Have we got a tarot deck for you! Todd Alcott, the mad scientist responsible for Open Culture’s favorite midcentury graphic mashups, infuses his Horror Tarot with a century’s worth of hair-raising, spine-tingling imagery. The artist admires the genre’s capacity f … | Continue reading
Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth: what a time and place to be alive. Or rather, what a time and place to be alive for people in the right countries and, more importantly, of the right classes, those who saw a new world taking shape around … | Continue reading
One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century, Gustave Doré made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he created one of the most memorable and popular illustrated editions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whi … | Continue reading
A new 4K restoration of Stop Making Sense debuted last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, then opened in theaters around the world. The promotional push for this cultural event started early (as featured here on Open Culture), and has involved the release of rarely … | Continue reading
?si=BKqiiloz1aFahBfk How do you pour a beer? You think you know the answer. You’re pouring the beer into a tilted glass, and minimizing the foam. According to Max Bakker, a Master Cicerone (or sommelier for beer), you’re getting it wrong. Above, he demonstrates the proper techniq … | Continue reading
When Jason Arday became a professor at University of Cambridge at the age of 37, he also became the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship there. That’s impressive, but it becomes much more so when you consider that he didn’t learn to speak until he was eleven ye … | Continue reading
Behold a crowdsourced, collaborative art project where more than 130 animators and filmmakers from 11 different countries joined together and remade a full episode of Frasier. (It’s the finale of Season 1, “My Coffee with Niles.”) The project’s mastermind, Jacob Reed, asked indiv … | Continue reading
Here on Open Culture, we’ve often featured the work of gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, creator of the channel Great Art Explained. Not long ago we wrote up his examination of the work of René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter responsible for such enduring images as Le fils … | Continue reading
Animation studio UPA—United Productions of America—is best known these days as the studio that gave us Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing (which inspired a certain website). But the studio, originally created by three former Disney employees, wanted to broaden horizons back in th … | Continue reading
Today, if you want to get started in home brewing, shop for a synthesizer, find out what cybernetics is, order non-genetically-modified seeds, start your own mushroom farm, learn how to repair a Volkswagen, subscribe to libertarian publications, purchase the work of Marshall McLu … | Continue reading
Author David Foster Wallace titled his famous address to Kenyon College’s Class of 2005 “This is Water,” a reference to its opening joke – self-mockingly framed as a “didactic little parable-ish story” that is “a standard requirement of US commencement speeches:” There are these … | Continue reading
We give you two perspectives on what’s happening in the Middle East this week. Above, foreign affairs columnist Fareed Zakaria talks with Scott Galloway about the conflict in Israel, providing historical context and exploring what’s likely to come. And below Yuval Noah Harari (hi … | Continue reading
In the year 79, AD Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying both Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1750, an Italian farmworker discovered an entombed seaside villa in Herculaneum while digging a well. When excavated, the residence yielded hundreds of scrolls, all of them turned into what looked … | Continue reading
Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy, but Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos does. As Dr. Santos points out during the above appearance on The Well, the goals of natural selection have been achieved as long as humans survive and reproduce, but most of us crave something more … | Continue reading
If you don’t live in a part of the world with a lot of hummingbirds, it’s easy to regard them as not quite of this earth. With their wide array of shimmering colors and frenetic yet eerily stable manner of flight, they can seem like quasi-fantastical creatures even to those who e … | Continue reading
All of us, across the world, know that Italy is shaped like a boot. But almost none of us know that, in the regions of Apulia and Calabria at the country’s “heel” and “toe,” live small communities who, among themselves, still speak not Italian but Greek. The word “still” applies … | Continue reading
Today, the name Judith hardly calls to mind a woman capable of great violence. Things seem to have been different in antiquity: “The Biblical story from the Book of Judith tells how the beautiful Israelite widow Judith bravely seduces and then kills the sexually aggressive Assyri … | Continue reading
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQmBsbt9blgIn the wake of Hamas' gruesome attack on Israeli civilians, political scientist Ian Bremmer explains 'the historical context of the conflict, how Israel might respond and what it means for Jews, Palestinians and the world at large.' The … | Continue reading
When André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement and author of its first manifesto, wrote that “the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world,” he was not alluding to the unfair lack of recognition experienced by his female peers. Marque … | Continue reading
With his dark suit, neat haircut, and bowler hat, René Magritte embodied early-twentieth-century Belgian normality. Yet the feelings his work stirred in their viewers were very much the opposite of normal. He had various ways of accomplishing this. One was “to combine two familia … | Continue reading
A picture is worth 1000 words, especially when you are a late-19th or early-20th century horticulturist eager to protect intellectual property rights to newly cultivated varieties of fruit. Or an artistically gifted woman of the same era, looking for a steady, respectable source … | Continue reading
If you were to see Jean-Honoré Fragonard‘s L’Escarpolette, or The Swing, at the Wallace Collection, you might not think particularly hard about it. Though all the subtle light effects that make the young woman in pink pop out of the lush garden that surrounds her are impressive, … | Continue reading
Give it a chance, you won’t be disappointed. While the first 30 seconds of the video above may resemble an amateur iPhone prank, it soon becomes something unexpectedly enchanting—a visualization of the physics of music in real-time. The Youtuber places his phone inside an acousti … | Continue reading
If those who have read Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World — and even more so, those who’ve been meaning to read it — share any one desire, it’s surely the desire to read more books. And for those who have reading habits similar to Newport’s, … | Continue reading
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each… … | Continue reading
The Romans fashioned their buildings with concrete that has endured for 2,000 years. Their secret? Some researchers think it’s how the Romans heated lime. Others think it’s how they used pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash. Nowhere does coffee figure into the equation. Too b … | Continue reading
httvs://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpuV-kpXZRI In the fall of 1969, there were still a great many people who’d never heard a synthesizer. And even among those who had, few would have known how its unfamiliar sounds were actually made. Hence the importance of the segment from the BBC … | Continue reading
“If you’re in Venice, you might not enjoy it so much if you follow a tour-guide route that gets you to the main attractions.” So says Youtuber Manuel Bravo — whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on Pompeii, the Duomo di Firenze, and the Great Pyramid … | Continue reading
We know that Michelangelo wrote grocery lists; now we have evidence that Leonardo wrote resumes. “Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these … | Continue reading
Who created the first work of abstract art has long been a fraught question indeed. Better, perhaps, to ask who first said of a work of art that a kid could have made it. A strong contender in that division is the Russian artist Véra Pestel, whom history remembers as having react … | Continue reading
During the 15th and 16th centuries, fashionable men sported a codpiece. Originally a garment designed to protect and support the proverbial “Willy” (especially when men wore tights), the codpiece morphed into something else–a sign of virility, “a bulging and absurd representation … | Continue reading
A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Japanese art of kintsugi, whose practitioners repair broken pottery with gold in a manner that emphasizes rather than hides the cracks. Since then, the idea seems to have captured the Western imagination, inspiring no few onli … | Continue reading
It makes sense that Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes would be friends. Not only are they both respected filmmakers of Generation X, they’re both daughters of maverick American auteurs, a condition with its advantages as well as its disadvantages. The advantages, in Coppola’s case … | Continue reading
Some people talk to plants. The Carnegie Museum of Art‘s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring. “You have to …tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de’ Medici prior to star … | Continue reading
Noam Chomsky made his name as a linguist, which is easy to forget amid the wide range of subjects he has addressed, and continues to address, in his long career as a public intellectual. But on a deeper level, his commentary on politics, society, media, and a host of other broad … | Continue reading
“Did Scorsese make the best movie of each decade since the ’70s?” asks GQ‘s Zach Baron in a recent profile of that long-lived auteur. “Probably not (I think his case is weakest in the first decade of this century), but you could argue it, and many people have.” And indeed, you ma … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of the University at Leeds In the striking image above, you can see an early experiment in making books portable–a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle. According to the library at the University of Leeds, this “Jacobean Travelling Library” … | Continue reading
The Boy and the Heron, the latest feature from master animator Hayao Miyazaki, opened in Japan this past summer. In that it marks his latest emergence from his supposed “retirement,” we could label it not just as late Miyazaki, but perhaps even “post-late” Miyazaki. But the film … | Continue reading